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DSBL's list nameservers gone

DSBL's list nameservers have continued to answer queries for 10 months after the list went off. From now on, DSBL list queries (to *.list.dsbl.org, *.multihop.dsbl.org and *.unconfirmed.dsbl.org) will go to the nonexistant nameserver stop-using-dsbl.dsbl.org, which resolves to the unroutable example IP address 192.0.2.1.

This should keep nameservers everywhere working like they should, while slowing down spam filters that are still using DSBL. Hopefully the annoyance of the slowdown will convince the remaining DSBL users to stop using DSBL. DNS timeouts should not cause any email to get lost.

The 3/9/09 change caused a 50-second delay for every email recepient. Most ISP email servers accepted this delay. Some ISP email servers (e.g. earthlink) dropped the connection and tried again later, and again later, and again later.....

This was more than an annoyance. The email messages were not received after many days, especially for email messages with multiple recipients because the delay was more than 1 minute.

I was just wondering - if you guys closed the project, there should have been a viable alternative first rather than depending on ifs and buts (slowing down). I reckon many people will get real problems.

I didn't know the list was dead either. For the past year the dsbl list has had no effect. I guess I should have picked that up. For the past 24 hours however it has blocked all incoming email to my organisation. That's one way of getting my attention!

DSBL has *not* taken the "list the world" route some other blocklists have taken to get rid of tens of thousands of DNS queries per second. Instead, DSBL has pointed the name server for the lists at an unroutable IP address, so lookups time out:

This change just blew up an old, alternate SMTP server I was running that used rblsmtpd. Not sure if there's a better way of doing it, and obviously you shouldn't have to support a dead service forever, but thought I'd let you know I ran into issues.

Well, if you haven't removed this list from RBLSMTPD entries in your Qmail setup by now, you should get a whacking wake up call so that you remove them. Longer ago, I thought I had removed the DSBL lookups from all my Qmail servers, but I had missed one, so I removed it, as I should have done months ago.

Edit your /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run file and remove any DSBL entries, e.g. look for entries like "list.dsbl.org," and remove the entire line: